How Google Rich Snippets Help to Sell Your Products and Services

If you’ve done a Google search lately, you’ve likely noticed that some results include more information than others. Search results can now include things like user reviews and star ratings, product descriptions, photos, pricing and availability.

This additional information helps to make the search results stand out from the crowd, with the expectation that they will entice more users to click through.

The good news is that you can display these details in your own search results by adding some Google “Rich Snippets” code to your web site.

Adding Snippets to Your Site

One of the most popular snippets that businesses are adding to their web sites is customer ratings/reviews. You can specify an overall rating (up to 5 stars), and even include individual customer reviews.

If you’ve got customer testimonials and positive reviews on your web site, why not draw attention to them in your Google search results? The following code shows how to use your reviews to add a rating summary to your site:

<div>
<span itemprop=”itemreviewed”><strong>Alltel Pty Ltd</strong></span> <br />
<span itemprop=”rating” itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Rating”>
<span itemprop=”average”>5</span> out of <span itemprop=”best”>5</span></span>
based on <span itemprop=”votes”>39</span> ratings. <br />
<span itemprop=”count”>39</span>
<a href=”http://alltel-talk.com.au/about/testimonials/”>user reviews.</a></p>
</div>

You can format the snippet code to match the style of your web site, and also add additional information such as an image showing the star rating. Note that the rich snippet must be visible on your web site. If you include snippets inside hidden divs, Google will not display your rich snippet text in its search results.

Also, don’t give in to temptation by giving yourself a higher rating than you deserve. Google has tools for reporting people who are posting bogus snippets, and you don’t want to get on their bad side! If your reviews aren’t on the same page as the snippet code, we recommend that you include a link to them so that your site visitors (including Google) can click through and verify them.

It’s not only ratings and reviews you can add to your search results. Google supports rich snippets for all of the following types of content:

• Authors: Supported snippets include Name, Job Title and Photo for one or multiple authors.
• Events: Supported snippets include Date, Description, Photo and Ticket Information for one or multiple up-coming events.
• Music: Supported snippets include Song Name, Song Length and Download Link for individual songs on an album.
• People: Supported snippets include Name, Nickname, Photo, Job Title, URL and other Contact Details.
• Products: Supported snippets include Name, Brand, Reviews, Availability, Pricing and Special Offers.
• Recipes: Supported snippets include Photo, Description, Review, Preparation and Cooking Times, and Nutritional Information.
• Software Applications: Supported snippets include Image, Rating, Reviews, Special Offers and Supported Operating Systems.
• Web Navigation Breadcrumbs: Shows the breadcrumb navigation for pages in your search results, e.g. Alltel > Products & Services > 1300 Numbers.

The more information you can provide through snippets for your Google results, the better the chance you have of people clicking through to find out more. Google have said that the rich snippets do not affect your search ranking, but they’re finding that they do encourage more people to click through to your web site.

Google provides a number of tools to guide you through adding different types of rich snippets to your site. A good place to start is on their Webmaster Tools > Rich Snippets page.

The Power of Testimonials and Reviews

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful forms of marketing because of its credibility. Having your customers say that you provide great service for a great price has much, much more value than if you say the same thing about yourself.

Potential customers want to hear what you’ve done for your previous clients, and how your products/services helped others who are facing similar challenges. We often have new customers tell us that one of the reasons they chose Alltel is because of our customer testimonials.

If your customers have provided you with testimonials and you haven’t marked them up as snippets yet, you should do it today!

And if you want to provide any kind of feedback or testimonial for Alltel, we’d love to hear from you. (As way of an incentive, all testimonials published on our sites contain do-follow links.)